The confidence of her class

The axis of Gwen Raverat's life passes through some of the most visited areas of British art and letters, and although she was a minor figure in the Cambridge of Rupert Brooke, the Bloomsbury group and the art-school milieu of the first decades of the 20th century, almost by default her experiences bear the imprint of those well-trodden years and demonstrate what was genuinely remarkable about them.

For all its faults of exclusivity, privilege and frequent silliness, the artistic and social confidence exhibited by women of that period is striking. Gwen Raverat's own daughters reverted to the norm of motherhood and housewifery; such a steep incline in the trajectory of sexual equality was not to come again for some years.

Raverat's grandfather was Charles Darwin and, like Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, she seems to have been empowered by a sense of dynastic intellectual entitlement, naturally following her early talent for painting, unburdened by any sense of impropriety.

She grew up in Cambridge in considerable style - she later wrote about the Victorian twilight of her childhood in her memoir Period Piece - and procured drawing lessons from the dynamic Miss Greene (Graham's aunt, as it happens), who fired women into the Slade School of Art from her presuffrage bunker with commendable accuracy.

Raverat was a gifted painter, but her genius was for woodcuts. Her small, intricate monochrome images are unutterably haunting: melancholic, deeply private, strangely dream-like, they are like photographs of things not seen but recollected. Raverat later pursued a successful career as an illustrator of children's books, and it is exactly this quality, the feeling of looking at something one looked at as a child, that marks out her work.

Meanwhile, she was entangled in a tortuous romance with the anglicised French painter, Jacques Raverat, whom she had met at Cambridge through Rupert Brooke. The inevitable Ka Cox, who, it seems, plagues nearly all biographies of this period, dolefully tussled with her over Jacques, but Gwen won the day and sensibly moved with him to the south of France.

There they lived something of an idyll, until Jacques began to exhibit symptoms of multiple sclerosis. His decline and death, lasting over two years, were appalling: Gwen admitted that in the end, as he lay asphyxiating, she put a pillow over his face. Not surprisingly, she consequently became extremely depressed.

She returned to London with her children, to Bloomsbury, perhaps expecting to find solace in the embrace of its famous residents, whom she had once counted among her friends. Virginia Woolf had been conducting a prolonged and bizarre postal flirtation with Jacques in his last years, but she did not extend her brittle sympathies to his poor wife.

Those Bohemian snipers drove Raverat back to the Cambridge she had in her youth so burned to escape. This move seems to have robbed her of her artistic drive: she established herself as a matriarch in something of the style of her own mother, about whom she had once felt profoundly ambivalent.

Frances Spalding's account of Raverat is rather too decorous to be compelling. A more aggressive engagement either with her work or her life would have allowed one to hear Gwen Raverat above the noise of the people by whom she was surrounded.

It would be interesting, too, to know more of how history judges this well-appointed period, with its curious combination of artistic liberalism, social privilege and political deviance. Spalding, like her fellow Bloomsbury biographers, excuses her subjects their anti-Semitism, their snobbery, their preoccupation with the "servant problem".

If it is their art that justifies our interest, then their art merits greater scrutiny than is given it here.